Here in California, September can be an interesting month. It is “on the cusp” between summer and fall. Sometimes it is a hot summer month. Sometimes it is a cold fall month. Often it is dry.

So what’s happening now?

I’m sitting in my “easy chair” on the patio, under a ‘sleeping bag’ that has been opened to make a blanket of sorts. It’s cold.

At 8 AM it can often be a bit cool in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hot air inland can pull a blanket of fog in off the Pacific Ocean. Today is NOT like that. First off, I’m ‘south of the fog belt’ behind some mountains that keep the fog from getting here. Second, inland is cold right now too.

In Sacramento (State capital, about 80 miles inland from San Francisco and about 1/2 way to the Sierra Nevada Mountains) it is presently 56 F per Wunderground. Their predictions are:

Later in the day when it warms up in the sunny central valley, the fog might be pulled in. Not now. Presently SFO is also 56 F and Overcast; and all three of SFO, San Jose, and Sacramento report 0.0 winds. (But fog is predicted for this afternoon)

What can we read into these tea leaves?

There are several interesting things that come out of this chart. First off, realize that the weather here comes from about 30 miles to 60 miles North East (up toward Bodega Bay). It comes in off the Pacific Ocean on a slant. (Sometimes on rare occasions from the South East). So for several thousand miles, the air mass is conditioned by ocean and sun and not much else. That current off the California Coast is cold, and the current NEVER gets warm in N. California. I’ve turned quite red swimming in it south of here in Santa Cruz and gone to near hypothermic, in August, when it was quite hot on shore in the sun…

Santa Cruz is a harbor, so the water warms a bit with the day / night sun cycles, still it’s pretty cold:

We can again see the modulation with sunshine, but the rapid plunge back to base cold levels at night and with no enduring heat retention from ‘back radiation’. There is also an interesting chart here:

You can see that Alameda (inside San Francisco Bay, over on the East Bay side) is warmer while Bodega Bay (outside and more exposed to the current – it isn’t a very big bay) is colder and more representative of the offshore conditions. Santa Cruz is a tad warmer as it is a larger bay, but still fairly exposed to the ocean currents.

So for Sept 1, the offshore ocean is about 54 F, and it only warms a few degrees as you go inland a few miles. Also notice how remarkably stable those temperatures are. Bodega warms 3 F over the entire summer. Santa Cruz about the same. (but the Alameda station just sits there at about 66 F, already being solar warmed).

So those nightime temps are fairly consistent and a few degrees warmer than the ocean, but not a whole lot. The air does warm crossing the low mountains between there and here, but it's a fairly consistent small amount at night. Our lows are clearly tied directly to the ocean temperature and not much else. The ocean doesn’t change much at all, mostly showing signs of minor warming right near shore in the shallows and inland.

Notice that after several days of predicted "clear" in San Jose, the final night temperature is 50 F, whereas today with "partly cloudy" it is predicted 57 F. When the air is clear, more daytime warming happens and the onshore winds pick up cooling the evenings. Both cooling via ocean winds and cooling via night time radiation to space.

When it is cloudy, the air 'sits' longer and has time to warm from the ground ( that is a fairly constant temperature a few feet down. Nationally I think the average is 56 F and while I'd expect California to be a bit warmer, it won't be much.) So lower daytime highs, but higher nighttime lows.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, there’s always Tomorrow

You can also see that tomorrow is predicted to spike up to 91 F Max then 93 F the next day, then slowly ramp down to 88 F. Fairly typical pattern. Stagnate the winds under cloud, cloud clears and solar heating begins, air starts to move under clear sky and both Min and Max get depressed from onshore cold air movement. Fog gets pulled in over San Francisco. Eventually cooler air or a bit more clouds reach Sacramento and the Great Valley inland, dampening the rising air there; and the winds slow. Repeat…

Send In The Clouds, There Must be Clouds

What is the effect of clouds? Well, first off, it modulates this whole air mass motion. That's kind of a big deal when you can have 10 F swings of temperature from it. Look at San Jose under partly cloudy and under clear. 79F and 93F. 14 F difference. Clouds matter, and they matter a lot.

The San Francisco prediction for Tuesday is kind of interesting, too. It has fog, but an 81 F high. WUWT? Well, sometimes the fog doesn’t come in until AFTER the day has warmed… So looks to me like San Francisco gets a couple of days of warming, up to 81 F, and THEN the air gets moving and the fog rolls in to cool things off late Tuesday afternoon / evening.

Now compare Sacramento temperatures to San Francisco. The major difference is just distance to water. There is a large ‘bay delta’ system of water with a shipping channel to Sacramento, so lots of water between the coast and Sacramento, but also a lot of dry brown farm land (California goes brown in the summer from no rain, except where there is irrigation. Irrigated places can be much cooler than the open range land. North East of Sacramento tends to be some of that range land, but along the bay / delta system tends to be green and irrigated, or the water itself).

For Sacramento, we have highs of about 100 F, while San Francisco is about 75 F. We get 20 F to 25 F of heating of the air as it moves from San Francisco, inland, to Sacramento. And that IS what it does. Right up the bay delta flat area. Sacramento is about 30 foot elevation, so not much ‘uphill’, and only 32 feet elevation 70 miles north of Sacramento. The whole central valley is very flat. So cool air flows in through the Golden Gate, over the bay delta toward Stockton / Sacramento, then spreads out into the Great Valley. Along the way is picks up about 20 F to 25 F of solar heating.

(In winter it can be exactly backwards. Dense “tule fog” sitting over the Central Valley holding temperatures down in the cold ranges while San Francisco can have a clear sunny day and be 20 F warmer in the sun… Similarly, the Sierra Nevada can be sunny, clear, and warm while the Central Valley sits under a cover of cold dank fog. It really does all come down to clouds and sun – including fog in the clouds portion.)

Looking At Metrics

Now we’ve got two metrics. It takes a few hours and about 80 miles of solar heated dirt to raise cold damp foggy air by 20 F to 25 F. As soon as the sun goes down, that heating is lost, and the air rapidly looses that heat, dropping back to within 4 F to 8 F of the lows at the origin point out to sea. Heat trapping? What heat trapping? Back radiation? WHAT back radiation? All I see is solar heating and ground / water moderation.

Next Wednesday, San Jose is back to a 50 F night time low, despite a 93 F daytime high a couple of days before. We cool from 57 F to 50 F under clear sky at night. Sacramento warms from 55 F to 64 F at night as the clouds clear off, but rapidly cools back to 57 F with a bit of air movement. Back radiation no help there. San Francisco sulking at 50 F to 54 F no matter what happens. Clouds being a bit warming, but San Francisco mostly just anchored to the ocean and fog. No back radiation help there.

The big take away from this profiles, for me, is that the WATER matters. As clouds. As fog. But that the CO2 doesn’t. Clouds coming and going modulate day time Max down and night time Min up, with the daytime drop more than the night time rise. Clear sky rapidly returns to ‘base settings from the ocean’ and ‘peak from the sun’.

The Almanac

What has “Global Warming” done for us? Well, not a whole lot. Our “Normal” is 83 F and yesterday was 69 F. We’ve cooled off by 14 F. Now I’m sure that Hansen and friends will assert that if we just average and homogenize that number enough we can find it’s really warmed. Bull pucky. We’re below normal. That isn’t warming. Playing statistical games with averages of intensive variables is just a Magic Trick to confuse the innocent and uncritical. Note that even our MIN has gone down by 2 F, so those ocean cold temps are not a lot different either, and may be a touch on the cool side.

The records are also interesting. Max of 101 F(!) – hey, I told you it can be a hot summer day here in September. Set in 1950. So 60 years of “Global Warming” have gotten us all the way to 32 F BELOW the record and 14 F BELOW the ‘Normal’.

The Min was set in 1895 at 44 F. Man that must have been one odd cold day. Perhaps I’ll look up the weather history and see what was going on. There are times that we have winter days warmer than that. OK, the ‘Normal’ is 14 F above the record low, and we’re presently 12 F above the record low. A bit cool, but not too far off normal. I must note in passing, though, that the MIN was set just about the time Hansen chooses to “start time” in 1880… I’m sure it’s just a coincidence /sarcoff;>

So, all in all, we’re more or less in the middle of the Min / Max record ranges and not too far off the ‘Normal’, but a bit cold.

In Conclusion

Looks to me like “Global Warming” has done exactly and essentially nothing. It also looks like the local temperatures are strongly driven by the offshore water temperature (that has not risen) and clouds (that are a bit more this year) with CO2 having no visible effect at all; certainly not able to hold in any excess heating via ‘back radiation’ over the night. If it can’t do it for even 8 hours, how can it have any effect over decades?

It also looks like making an average of Min / Max and ignoring clouds just gives you a giant confounder from clouds as to what that average means. Ignoring the cloud percentage while making a Min / Max average is just rampant stupidity. Yet “that’s what they do”…

So, IMHO, it all comes down to clouds, sun, and winds. All things the climate model folks admit they handle badly and / or don’t handle at all. But they assert that if they average together what they do have it means something. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen…

26 Responses to September Swing

Statistics is not science: Statistics is a tool. Mathematical models are not real.

CO2 is a “trace gas” in air, insignificant by definition. It is 1/7th the absorber of IR, heat energy, from sunlight as water vapor which has 160 to 640 times as many molecules capturing 1120 to 4480 times as much heat and make 99.99% of all “global warming.” CO2 does less than 0.01% of global warming.

Carbon combustion generates 80% of our energy. Control and taxing of carbon would give the elected ruling class more power and money than anything since the Magna Carta of 1215 AD.

Read The Two Minute Conservative at http://tiny.cc/ahrlhw When you speak ladies will swoon and liberal gentlemen will weep.

I grew up in Southern California and my memories of September were that they were more often warmer than cooler. My sister was born towards the end of September, and one year it was beastly hot. The house had no AC and my mom decided that we were going to eat out on the front lawn, which was on the east side of the house and cooler than being inside. My mom brought out my sister’s birthday cake, candles lit and everything. We all sang “Happy Birthday” and as my Mom tilted the cake towards my sister to have her blow out the candles, the top layer of the cake slid right into my sister’s lap. The frosting had gotten too warm and, well, what a mess. It wasn’t funny at the time, but now we think it was hilarious. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was in the late 50’s or early 60’s.

There was frost in northern Britain yesterday -2C and before the end of August. Even in the South central heating was coming on and warmer clothes being brought out.
The El Nino that was getting everyone excited earlier is the strangest I have seen. Look at http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif and see the cold upwelling from the coast of Peru out into the Pacific. It looks more like the return of a La Nina.

Predicting what is going to happen based on the past will be difficult as this does not appear to have happened in quite this way before. Although Joe Bastardi had said he thought that any El Nino would die this winter; it looks like we won’t even really have one.

I live in the Cupertino / Saratoga area and I have a friend who lives in Southern Santa Cruz county. We were talking on the phone the other night and we both remarked that it seemed like an early fall this year. She has animals and crops and stuff and says to her it looks like fall is two to three weeks early this year. As for me, I just happen to notice that there is one certain day each year when it dawns on me that fall is coming. That day was early last week for me.

@Crosspatch“As for me, I just happen to notice that there is one certain day each year when it dawns on me that fall is coming. That day was early last week for me.”
Ditto for me here in the UK. Last year it was the end of August – at least 2 weeks earlier than normal. This year it has been even earlier – at least 10 days ago.

I came to the conclusion several years ago that here in the Lower 48, especially in the lower 21 of the Lower 48, that Oktoberfest needed to be moved to Oktober, and State Fairs too. Beer, bratwurst, beer, hotdogs, beer, pizza, beer, bbq, beer, funnel cake, and beer just seem to taste a lot better when there just a little nip in the air, and it makes the barns smell a little better too;-)

At one time “back then” the standard in the L.A. Basin was to have houses painted white with blue tile roofs. It kept the cooler in the “beastly heat” ;-) Maybe A/C has let folks forget what it was like then…

@Adrian Vance:

Pretty much sums up the science as it ought to be stated.

@Oliver:

That Monty Python bit in your last link is one of my all time favorites!

It does put us in perspective…

“And pray that there’s intelligent live somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!” ;-)

@Aldofo:

Yup, Climate change on all three of a 1500 year, 179 year, and 60 year cyclical basis…

@Sparks:

What’s bothering me is that I’m not even getting a hot summer… just medium warm at best and with cold nights.

@Ian W:

Frost, in August? Oh Dear! A lot of garden food crops are frost limited and the first and last frost dates are critical to total production and what can be grown.

Oddly, this year I have let some kale / collards stay in the ground and it’s done just fine all summer long. Normally kale doesn’t like our ‘hot dry summer’ but this time It’s happy as can be. Let some Fava beans run into summer too. Other than loosing some when I let them dry out too long ( not watching closely…) they have produced right up to, well, now. I took some out yesterday (making room for new plantings for fall) but left a few in that are still making pods.

The good news is that it looks like using “Mediterranean Crops” here in our Mediterranean climate; it’s all things they have seen before, so they are happy with it. The bad news is that a lot of the traditional ‘hot / cold cycle crops” from places like Iowa are not doing so well. Squash, for example. Started a dozen plants. Got 2 of them to really do well, and even there I’ve only had a couple of squash. Only now, way late in the season, am I getting a reasonable number of blossoms. Runner beans FINALLY made flowers (normally at this time of year I’ve got vines full of pods) and a couple of pods are showing up on some Greek Giant beans. All a bit too late, IMHO, as the season looks like Fall is coming a couple of weeks early.

I think a lot of it comes down to night time temps. Just too cold for some plants to be happy and set fruit. I got one volunteer tomato this year. It has TWO small tomatoes on it. (I’m going to save them for seeds. Anything that dealt with this cold night season growing 1/2 shaded and with no attention has something going for it ;-)

So for me, I’m reviewing all the Mediterranean and cold area crops and doing a replan on the garden. More Sweeds (Rutabaga) and beets, less corn and squash… more Kale and less greenbeans. More peas and less limas…

And yes, that blue finger of cold coming off of South America usually means the warm bit is over… Also note how cold / blue the water is off of California…

@Tckev:

I do think there’s a great opportunity for folks who loose money / crops due to cold to sue Hansen and NASA for “failure to deliver”. They promised global warming! And I want mine!!!
;-)

@Crosspatch:

You got it! Birds doing their thing early. Some garden plants wrapping up early. It’s the cold nights that tell them “time to pack up”, IMHO.

A couple of years back, some little finchy things stripped my Amaranth just about time to harvest the seeds. This year, they left early and the seeds came on late… so I just harvested a bag of tops yesterday. (Even at that, some of them were not fully ripe yet…) While it’s “nice to know” that ‘timing’ can be used as a pest management technique, it’s not exactly my idea of the best way to get yield… playing chicken with the end of the season…

@Verity:

It does seem that in the U.K. and California / Pacific Coast we get the ‘early cool’ warning while on the Eastern US / Eastern Europe they get more of a “dry warm last hurrah”…

I think I need to look more closely at ‘short season / cold season’ gardening methods as regularly used in the UK…

@Pascvaks:

Isn’t Oktoberfest in Oktober?…

@Adolfo:

It would be nice if we could better predict where that leads, a year or two in advance and with some detail. Racking up a set of “I told you so” predictions would be helpful…

Thanks for the post E.M. I notice a similar pattern here in San Diego county.

Concerning this…”That’s kind of a big deal when you can have 10 F swings of temperature from it. Look at San Jose under partly cloudy and under clear. 79F and 93F. 14 F difference. Clouds matter, and they matter a lot.”

Indeed! and one factor to consider when considering a change in cloud cover, is not just the “right now” affect on atmospheric T, but a lag affect. If global cloud cover increases one percent, then this is a great deal of long “residence time” energy not entering the long time heat storage bank of the oceans, so this additional lag may take years to manifest, and is not even considered by climate models.

BTW, I have not been absent because you did not wish to play with my though experiment concerning a non GHG world. I have just been busy doing volunteer work since I retired. You are the most even minded poster I know.

However I did state the main message of my perception of GHGs reducing the residence time of conducted energy (cooling) in a post at Tallbloke’s. In fact I am considering a second law to my first law, which you may rember to read as …”At its most basic only two things can effect the heat content of any system in a radiative balance. Either a change in the input, or a change in the “residence time” of some aspect of those energies within the system.”

EM-
Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany ~Mid-September to early Oktober (old custom from Crazy Ludwig Wedding Days Fest). In the States it’s often a “SeptemberFest” too that lasts a just for a long weekend in the less Germanic parts of the country; for some strange reason the sponsor(s) here want to have it during the same time the Bavarians do and ignore the “Climate” aspect of it all –I guess it’s like American Beer, it looks like beer, it kind’a smells like beer, it just doesn’t taste, feel, and really smell like beer. And when you remember that half the US is situated a little South of Munich (like we’re in Munich North Africa, not even in the EU zone on the globe;-) we ought to be able to move the date, right? I mean it’s not like we have to ask anyone or get the Pope to bless it, if we can call corn wheat and yellow water beer we can do anything we want, right?;-)

PS: For the others who think I’m off-planet about Oktoberfest, I’ve always paid attention to September temps. I really have;-)

E.M.
LOL on the idea of “sue Hansen and NASA for “failure to deliver”.
That would teach ’em.
Then again…I wonder if they’ve been loose enough with their prognostication to let the legal eagles start pecking at them?

@BobN –
LOL Now that’s foolproof, do you keep a record? Can’t imagine it has much to do with breed, but the way they do things today it just might be a factor (like the kind of trees they count old rings on). Bet some would pay good government money for your old refrigerator calenders;-)

@BobN –
Coincidents happen, really they do! Follow up to my last and your last about trees and rings. Went outside to get the paper, front page item: “Ancient Forest Lies 10 Miles Off Alabama Coast”. Interesting they blame/credit “Katrina”. Found the link and here it is. There will someday be more on hurricanes, old tree rings, ancient climate, sealevels, and whatnot, and we were there when it first hit the frontpage. We sure do live in a coincidental world;-)http://blog.al.com/live/2012/09/ancient_forest_lies_10_miles_o.html

@Pascvaks – good links. Never thought much about the gulf changes, but it appears to have change by way more than I would have thought. This is worthy of an extended investigation by someone. Love to know what drove the changes.

So lots of stuff has washed out into that broad flat area of “soon to be coastline again” and when the next glacial starts, and the water starts dropping, it all comes back above the surface; but with a thick fine mud over it. I suspect even more “stuff” will then be washing out into the deeper parts of the Gulf of Mexico during the rains of that process. But until it is all washed off, ought to be mighty rich farm land (assuming the initial few rains rinse the salts out but don’t erode the silt nearly as fast).

Wonder how many anchors, motors, winch handles, wine bottles, beer bottles, old shoes, …. will be showing up as archeological discoveries for the folks of 5,000 A.D.? ;-)

EM-
Don’t forget the Oil Rigs, the aka “Floating Temples to the Gods of the Sea and the Sun” used to forecast planetary and solar movements and maintain an as yet undecoded calender used for planting and fishing and social festivals;-)

E.M.
Besides my comment here… https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/september-swing/#comment-39729 … you may wish to consider if anything can be learned from the water T charts relating to water T swings, and daily high and low times under clear vs cloudy conditions. Something may be learned about the relative abilties of LWIR vs SWR to heat water, especially over consecutive cloudy days, despite ocean current affects, various disparate tidal affects, and[ other mixing which can occur to muddy the observation.

I just looked at the live chart for Santa Cruz harbour. Quite a steady drop in T since 9/2. ???Ocean current changes, strong tides, cloudy cool days and nights??

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